The Salvation Army: 150 Years of Blood and Fire

By Stephen Huggins

In 2015 the Salvation Army celebrated the 150th anniversary of its birth in the poverty and squalor of London’s East End. Today the Army is to be found in towns and cities throughout Britain, its members readily recognized through their military uniform and their reputation for good works widely acknowledged. Many people, however, are unaware of the origins and subsequent development of the organisation. At times Salvationists were imprisoned, beaten up in street riots and ridiculed in the press for their religious beliefs. Despite this persecution the Army put in place a program of help for the poor and marginalised of such ambition that it radically altered social thinking about poverty. There have been very few attempts at writing a wider and accessible account which locates the Army in its historical context. This is something of an omission given that it has made a unique contribution to the changing social, cultural and religious landscape of Britain. The Salvation Army: 150 years of Blood and Fire aims to provide a history of the organisation for the general reader and is for anyone who is interested in the interplay of people, ideas and events. The book reveals how the story of the Salvation Army raises fundamental questions about issues of power, class, gender and race in modern society; all as pertinent today as they were in Victorian Britain. The Salvation Army: 150 years of Blood and Fire also makes an extensive use of pictures illustrative of the Army’s history gathered from around the world, most of which have never previously been published.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Sep 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781399098236

Book preview

Introduction

The Salvation Army. What a strange name! What does it mean? Just what it says – a number of people joined together after the fashion of an army for the purpose of carrying salvation through the land, neither more nor less than that.

William Booth¹

Sometime around the middle of the 1880s, a young woman wrote a letter in which she pleaded for help. Nothing else is recorded of this woman, not where she lived, nor even her name. It seems that six years previously she had become pregnant and was then deserted by the unborn child’s father. Unmarried, she was thrown out by her family accused of bringing shame and scandal to their door. With no means of support, the woman had chosen to end her life by laying down on the railway tracks. Amazingly, when the train passed over she was not killed but sustained the most horrific of injuries to both her legs so that they had to be amputated well above the knee. Within a month the woman had given birth to a daughter and the two were admitted to the local workhouse where they remained. Undeterred by her circumstances and wishing to improve upon them, the woman wrote explaining how she was prevented from leaving the workhouse to take up work because the parish authorities insisted that her daughter must also leave their dubious care at the same time. She sent the letter to the London headquarters of the Salvation Army. Clearly, the woman had heard of the Army and the work that it did to help anyone who was in difficult circumstances. It seems really quite remarkable that the letter should be written to people whom she had never met and provided such intimate details of her life. Perhaps that the letter was written at all says something of the desperation to which she had been driven? It speaks, too, of the growing reputation of the Salvation Army. The letter was read by Florence Booth, a senior officer in the Army, who offered the woman a home, work and a new start in her life.

Today, the Salvation Army is an iconic feature of towns and cities throughout much of Britain, its uniform making members immediately identifiable. Indeed, it is hard to imagine the history of modern Britain without the Salvation Army. So much has the Army become woven into the fabric of society that, quite remarkably for a Christian church, it is now even possible for the amateur enthusiast to buy its figurines to accompany a model train set.

The Salvation Army was the creation of a Victorian married couple, William and Catherine Booth, who were extraordinary people by the standards of any age. William was already aged fifty when he began to lay the foundations for the Army in the merciless squalor of London’s East End, before going on to become its first General. He was arguably one of the most powerful, influential and innovative social and religious thinkers of the nineteenth century. William was possessed of both physical and moral courage, facing down his opponents with equanimity, whether they were from the Church of England, the Establishment or the brewery trade. He had no time for reputations and once asked Cecil Rhodes, the evil architect of grand imperialism in Southern Africa, about the state of his soul. Though William eschewed scholarship as unnecessary to his work, he preached as many as an incredible 60,000 sermons all around the world. He was endowed with an unshakeable certainty about the truth of his beliefs. When frequently derided and lampooned in the press, it all meant absolutely nothing to him.

At a time when women were very much precluded by men from having any public role or authority, Catherine Booth took a lead in the development of the Salvation Army. She became its ‘Mother’, displaying a gift for public speaking and employing a keen intellect that was undoubtedly superior to her husband’s. There can be little doubt that without Catherine the Salvation Army would have developed very differently. In fact, it might reasonably be said that it was Catherine, more than William, who defined and shaped the Army’s ethos. Indeed, it was she who initiated the Army’s help for the poor, its emphasis on gender inequality and demand for strict temperance. Yet throughout her life, Catherine suffered from a chronic and sometimes painfully debilitating medical condition, notwithstanding bearing eight children in only eleven years, while often working to support the family when her husband could not. She was a woman who could look adversity in the eye and stare it down.

William and Catherine were not people whose religious beliefs distracted them from the pressing social and political issues of the day. Rather, it was entirely because of their Christian faith that the Booths involved themselves with a characteristically reckless enthusiasm for a far-reaching and ambitious programme of help for the poor, hungry and homeless, the many women working as prostitutes, the reform of prisoners, the support for frontline soldiers and the provision of medical services for those who had none.

The Booths’ Salvation Army was something of a paradox in that it was both influenced by the religious, social and cultural context from which it emerged yet, at the same time, often took a profoundly countercultural position. The Victorians did not really know how to respond to an organisation that developed as, perhaps, the only authentic working class religious movement, gave women an equal right to authority and leadership and used a battery of wildly innovative approaches to worship and mission. No wonder that Victorian society was equally amused by and yet fearful of the Salvation Army at the same time. The Army was seldom out of the news. Its good works were widely reported but so, too, were allegations about financial irregularities, associations with criminals and its complete lack of taste and decorum in all matters. Victorian newspaper editors loved to fill their pages with stories about this most unusual of religious organisations.

The lasting legacy of the Booths has undoubtedly been the part they played in changing social attitudes to the issue of poverty. Until then the prevailing view in Victorian Britain had been that the poor suffered poverty as a moral consequence of their own actions; in other words, they got what they deserved. From this viewpoint, there was no real compunction to do anything to help them. Through the vigorous and sustained campaigning of the Salvation Army, the debate began to be moved so that the wider causes of poverty became the central focus rather than simply apportioning blame on the individual. In all this, the Salvation Army has helped move Britain from a society in which a life of poverty might well mean spending it in the workhouse or on the streets, to one which has embraced the ideal of the whole of society providing for the needs of the disadvantaged through the Welfare State.

What then of the history of the extraordinary movement which the Booths founded? Strangely, though the Army is well known in Britain, there are few who are aware of its origins and subsequent development. However, the history of the Salvation Army is important because it is part of the history of modern Britain. The story of the Army continues to hold a mirror into which it can be hard to look for what it reveals about issues of power, class, gender and race which are still very much alive today as they were in Victorian Britain.

The loss of many of the Salvation Army’s historical records on the night of 10 May 1941, at the height of the Blitz, prompted the organisation to begin writing its own official history just after the end of the war. The work has continued over the past seventy-five years and now extends to nine volumes with a tenth in preparation. Necessarily written by several authors, this body of work is rich in detail and an excellent source but, as often the case with history which has been written in-house, it lacks something of a sense of perspective. This is not to devalue the work but to acknowledge that its purpose is one of celebration and justification rather than criticism. Set against this there have recently been several scholarly works that focus in detail on particular aspects of the Army’s history. However, there have been few attempts at providing a general and wider account which locates the Salvation Army in its historical context. This is something of an omission given that the Salvation Army has made a singular contribution to the changing social, cultural and religious landscape of Britain. Its history should be known by anyone who is interested in the interplay of people, ideas and events.

When William died in 1912, some twenty-two years after his beloved Catherine, the headline in John Bull, the popular magazine, suggested that his death would mean the end of the Salvation Army; history has shown otherwise. In 2015, the Army celebrated its 150th anniversary and much has gone on in this time resulting in a great and intriguing hinterland to the story of this so familiar yet equally singular organisation.

Chapter One

The Roots of the Salvation Army

The Army has invited the drunkard, the harlot, the criminal, the pauper, the friendless, the frivolous throngs to come and seek God. It has gone to these classes who are not found in churches, who are without hope and help, who are friendless.

William Booth¹

William Booth was born on 10 April 1829 at 12, Notine Place, Sneinton, today a suburb of Nottingham. Although his family was not among the poorest, they were frequently left with very little by way of financial security because of fluctuations in the various business ventures of his alcoholic father, Samuel. Unsurprisingly, this impacted badly on the family and William’s early years were not at all happy ones. While the Booth family was not especially religious, nevertheless, William was baptised as a baby at St Stephen’s, the local Anglican parish church where he later attended Sunday School. He was also sent to nearby Bleasby to be taught to read and write. During a later upturn in the family’s fortunes, the boy attended the Biddulph’s School in Nottingham. The school had a Methodist foundation which would prove to have a profound and lasting influence on the rest of his life.

In 1842, the family was once more thrown into turmoil with further business failures on Samuel’s part. Aged thirteen, William had to be taken out of school so that he could work and contribute to the family income. His father had him apprenticed to a pawnbroker, Francis Eames, a member of the Unitarian Church. Through this work, a constant stream of poor and desperate people came in front of the boy and the damaging effects of poverty were much impressed on his young mind. A few months later William would come to realise this more personally when his father died bankrupt, putting the family under even greater financial pressure. William’s mother, Mary, was faced with ruin and took the family to a poorer district in the city where she ran a small haberdashery shop. However, life here was to prove difficult as in the following years there was a depression in the Nottinghamshire lace-making industry which meant that many were unemployed, leaving huge numbers of local families without income and facing starvation. William certainly had much opportunity to learn for himself about the damage that poverty did to people’s lives. The situation was similarly grave throughout much of the country and there developed widespread political discontent and agitation for change. Radical groups emerged, such as the Chartists, whose aim was to gain political rights and influence for the emerging working class. In 1847, the Chartist leader, Fergus O’Connor, was elected locally as MP for Nottingham and William found his powerful oratory convincing. The Chartists’ strong ideals and commitment to the poor attracted the idealistic and compassionate young man. Later, the journalist, W.T. Stead put it rather well, observing that for William, if the Chartists were for the poor, then he was for the Chartists.

However, it was not to be politics but religion which was to become the wellspring of William’s life. Methodism had already been influential on him through his school and although no longer a pupil he was encouraged by Sampson Biddulph, the school’s owner, to join the worship at Broad Street Chapel, Nottingham, where he was a trustee and lay preacher. By now William had formed a friendship with Will Sansom, a young Methodist, who also invited him to worship at the chapel. In later life, William would always gratefully acknowledge the influence that Methodism had on him.

William’s attendance at Broad Street brought the young boy to hear some of the great Methodist preachers of the day and the effect was to have a lifelong influence on him. In 1844, aged only fifteen, William was deeply impressed by hearing Isaac Marsden, a lay preacher from Doncaster, and his mind began to stir. Two years later he would also be greatly influenced by the American Revivalist Movement. The Revivalists preached the need for holiness in a person’s life, arguing that unless an individual came to Christian faith then nothing less than hell awaited. Revivalist meetings always came with an invitation for the unconverted to repent, believe and live a life of holiness. Three Revivalist preachers who came to Nottingham at this time were to have a powerful impact on William: Charles Finney, a Presbyterian, and the Methodists, James Caughey and Phoebe Palmer. When James Caughey preached at Broad Street Chapel, William was in the congregation avidly listening to him. He later recalled the effect on him of hearing Caughey’s straightforward, conversational style of preaching through which he pressed people to make an immediate decision about faith.

William now began an active ministry. Together with like-minded young friends, including Will Sansom, he joined a small group of teenagers who took the Christian message to the local poor of the nearby Meadow Platts area. Preaching short and direct addresses in the open air and using lively worship songs the young men called for on-the-spot conversions. Much practical help was also given to those in dire need. While they were by no means unsuccessful in their efforts this was not necessarily always appreciated by those in authority. On one occasion William had gathered around him some forty young pauper children whom he took to Broad Street Chapel where he seated them in the best pews in the building. For his actions William found himself censured by the chapel elders who instructed that in future he was only to bring such people in by the back door and then to sit them on those seats as befitted their station in life. Undeterred, William redoubled his efforts having learned at first hand the reluctance of the mainstream churches to engage with the urban poor. All these experiences were much to be drawn on later and to great effect by William. He always maintained that in his teenage ministry there had been a miniature Salvation Army.

William then came to the notice of Edward Rabbits, a local Methodist bootmaker, who had heard of his prowess at preaching and offered to become his private benefactor. William happily and readily accepted. Now that he had financial backing he was able to commit to a preaching ministry and accepted a position with a group of local chapels. However, as useful as this all was, Rabbits was able to do something for William of much greater service when in 1852 he introduced him to the young Catherine Mumford, his future wife and partner in the Salvation Army. Rabbits had invited William to come to his home for a temperance meeting tea party where the young man had agreed to recite an American monologue called The Grog Seller’s Dream. It was then that William caught the attention of Catherine, a committed teetotaller and deeply spiritual young woman. The couple met again shortly after on Good Friday, they fell in love and became engaged in a short time on 15 May. Both twenty-three they had begun a relationship based on love, companionship and a shared religious outlook which would last until Catherine’s death in 1890.